


Haunted

by BashfulInfidel



Series: Vignettes [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:02:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7323517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BashfulInfidel/pseuds/BashfulInfidel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John closes his eyes, for what little difference it makes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> Stupid title is stupid.  
> See if you can guess what novel I've been reading recently.

The safe-house is in shambles. Slimy wet drips from the rotting wood slung low overhead, onto hair matted brown with blood and grime. The earth below is springing to life as the summer rain falls, rejuvenating the soils of a village abandoned, a woods left to desiccate. Earthworms wriggle in the underground and roots plump with water, their salty dirt casts slowly loosening as they stretch with new life. 

John leans his head against the rough stone of a wall. The visor is off, he is once more in the dark – _ha_ – and his remaining senses are once again overcompensating. The scritch of a cicada as it emerges from the hollow of an ancient oak reverberates in his ear, he feels the tickle of a crow’s feet as it scrabbles across the sagging roof to reach its nest. Through the stone, he smells the thickening sludge that will make it a right pain in the ass to reach the old excavation site tomorrow. 

He closes his eyes. There is a different sort of darkness in doing so, he has come to realise. A different sort of reality, a different sort of control. His worst fears haunt the dank caverns and dusty tunnels behind closed eyes, a lightless world of eternal insecurity, grief, terror. He had thought, before that blindness had been forsaken for a new kind of blindness, that sleep was living death, living burial; the nightmares his mind could conjure even when he was safe and well-rested in his chambers had twisted peals of laughter and shouts of victory into anguished pleas for reprieve and furious accusations of failure – his failure to predict Armageddon, his failure to prevent a death, his failure to protect a comrade, a friend, a lover. It had warped the hellfire of war into a Biblical hellfire, with all the special effects and inventive torture and none of the justice, the absolution, the divine righteousness. 

But he has seen living death, and that is not what it looks like. Living death smells of decaying meat and fermenting leaf litter, it tastes of the bitter poison of a festered grudge and the sweet musky promise of what could never be, it slides under skin and freezes the veins with a single touch, it skulks through dark corners and darker memories, predatory and blacker than a moonless night, wearing the face of an owl mangled into a cruel snarl as it hunts for fresh blood, for vengeance, for hate. The world of dreams and shadows is a world of horror, to be sure, but it is a world where John can pretend a light once existed, a man named Jack Morrison once saved the world, standing proudly beside another with the sharp handsome features, the sleek musculature, the understated grace, of a jaguar. 

The recollection is a stab through his chest. He has looked down enough times to know the wound intimately – it is not corporeal, there will be no blood spilt and no life taken (not again). But there will be the crushing of his ribs, the constricting of his throat, the acridity of bile as it forces its way up his oesophagus, burning his palate, blanching his tongue. The ghost of Gabriel’s arm lingers in a decidedly brotherly embrace across his shoulders, curls around the nape of his neck (how could he not be doing this on purpose, how could he not know how erogenous that patch of skin is) as he leans in to whisper, moist and insinuating, into his ear. A trace of spice, of zesty shampoo and sweat, of gunpowder. The feathery brush of his black beard, his thick, unkempt hair. And his voice: deep, rolling, guttural. Slow and thick, with that gravelly undertone, too warm for a growl, too sensuous for a friend. 

The arm snakes around his neck, fingers brushing across his pulse, press down, testing. Tempting, heady, the blood pounding hot and aroused in his ears at the moment his breath bates. And then. Then, the grip tightens, the arm locking, the fingers transmuting into unforgiving claws, tearing into his throat, mauling his artery (there is no gore, only his voice as it drains out). He reaches a hand, weak and fumbling, to tear away from Death’s grasp, opens his mouth to suck in a desperate breath, to say something, to call to him (and what he would do for a word, a whisper, a second). 

The cold metal of Gabriel’s mask presses against his jaw. He can smell the stale breath and putrid flesh through its cavities, that marriage of rafflesia and vulture feed and human tissue. The knife’s edge of the mask cuts into his cheek, kisses his lip. Another set of claws emerge to prod at his useless sightless eyes, to pick at the scab across them. His breath is stolen by the laughter, cold and bloodthirsty – and deep, rolling, guttural – as it pushes its cloistering, smoky way through his mouth, claims his nostrils and lungs, coils around his heart, the rhythm of elephants stampeding across drums, nestles in the bones of his soon-to-be husk. 

_Not like this_ , he thinks. 

Jack stands and wears his visor. The rain has subsided, and he would rather walk through the muck to the nearest town and get a fucking shower and some workspace to make sense of his new leads than sit through another downpour with his miserable fantasies for company. 

_Not like this_.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know if there are any spelling errors, I'll be happy to fix those up.


End file.
